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Sonoma-Marin transit gearing up for service
While this could be considered completely off-topic, it does deal with an effort to publicize mass transit. The show currently running at the MSOE “Grohmann Museum” in Milwaukee on the North Shore Line is not to be missed. Interesting 1922 promo. videos, the poster art, and John Gruber’s selection of his photos of the last days. Thank goodness for his efforts. And the searing irony is that was the North Shore still in business, it would be a booming mass transit line which would be removing hundreds of cars from the roads. As one who is itimately familiar with Milwaukee-Chicago travel, one can only mourn the short-sighted loss.
It is too bad that SMART does not connect all the way to San Francisco or at least to the ferry that would take us there. This really is a train to nowhere. Other than a few people who commute from Santa Rosa to San Rafael, this train serves nobody else and is not interconnected with other meaningful mass transit such at BART. It also does not connect to other passenger rail like Amtrak.
If we were to go to San Francisco, it would take at least three hours and $25 per person to get there. It is still cheaper to drive and get there in 1/3 the time and for much lower cost. Driving the car with one or more additional passengers decreases the cost per person even more.
This is a train that is subsidized by federal and local taxpayers but only serves a small amount of people. What a shame.
This is in response to Mr. Larson from Wisconsin. It’s too bad the Northwestern Pacific gave up its electric trains when it did - February 1941, but a lot of people knew we were going to go to war and the cars were needed in southern California. The Southern Pacific’s East Bay electric trains also went to southern California and all of the cars ran for a lot of years on the Pacific Electric. If the trains were still running, they would be overrun with commuters, who would have a connection to San Francisco at Sausalito, Calif.
From a Silicon Valley viewpoint, BART may be meaningful to someone who works in SF, but BART has had a major impact on rational and useful transit planning for the rest of us. The non-standard rail BART to San Jose cut off any standard rail use across Dumbarton Bridge, from the San Joaquin/Sacramento Valleys and the commute from south of Santa Clara County and across from the lower San Joaquin. BART to SJ has taken 80% of the last two transit tax measures and is still short of SJ. Even when finished, it will still be a cross-platform system that could have been achieved at Fremont with an expanded CalTrain and ACE system.The next transit measure is in danger of failure because of the lack of faith with the populace who want better transit. An upgraded CalTrain/ACE could already have been in operation and saved 2 or 3 billion dollars.